Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Four Degrees of Separation

Perhaps the saying should be four degrees of separation, rather than six?

Using data on the links among 721 million Facebook users, a team of scientists discovered that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the United States was 4.37, and that the number separating any two people in the world was 4.74. As John Markoff and Somini Sengupta report in today’s New York Times, the findings highlight the growing power of the emerging science of social networks:

The original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb.

The new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population. The findings were posted on Facebook’s site Monday night.…

“When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rain forest,” the company wrote on its blog, “a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend.” The caveat there is “Facebook user” — like the Milgram study, the cohort was a self-selected group, in this case people with online access who use a particular Web site.

How many people around the world are you connected to through your Facebook account? And how many of your Facebook “friends” are actual friends, or simply “buddies”? To learn more about the research and its implications for social networks, read the full report, “Separating You and Me? 4.74 Degrees,” and then please join the discussion below.